A Gothic Coffer

Written by Ed Potten, formerly Keeper of Printed Books at the John Rylands Library and Head of Rare Books at Cambridge University Library. Ed is currently the Principal Consultant on the Werck der Bücher project in collaboration with the University of Manchester, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Erlangen, and on the Incunabula Cataloguing Project at the John Rylands Library. He has published widely on book and library history, with a particular focus on the fifteenth century.

Sadly, single leaf prints taken from woodblocks in the fifteenth century rarely survive in context. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new breed of print collectors became fascinated with the earliest wood and metal cuts. These collectors did not, however, want their prints pasted into books, nor inconveniently attached to church pews, walls, and alms shovels. So, prints tended to be removed from their original homes, to be mounted onto card, or kept in albums, so their owners could easily peruse them.

The John Rylands Library has several examples of prints either still in context, or where the context is clearly recorded. The famous impression of the St Christopher woodcut, and its companion Annunciation woodcut, are still affixed to the wooden boards of the manuscript in which they were placed in the mid-fifteenth century. A metal cut image of Christ on the Mount of Olives is now loose, but we know that in the 1450s it was one of three impressions within a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, now at the Huntington Library. Perhaps the most evocative survival at Rylands, however, is a woodcut impression of the Sacred Monogram, pasted into a coffret – a small wooden chest – in Paris in about 1500.

The Sacred Monogram – a symbolic representation of Christ, here in the form of the letters IHS, the opening of the word ‘Jesus’ in Greek – was a common motif in fifteenth-century devotion. Often depicted surrounded with the Instruments of Christ’s Passion, the Monogram acted as a focus for private devotion and contemplation. In the Rylands print, the stem of the H is formed into a crucifix, and it is accompanied by two monks, who kneel before a eucharistic chalice. This woodcut is one of a group produced in or around Paris in the late fifteenth century by a workshop inspired by Jean d’Ypres, a multi-media artist, responsible for painted altarpieces, stained glass windows, designs for tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, and designs for woodcuts.

The coffret is made of wood, probably birch, covered with leather, and the whole is reinforced with nine iron fittings, hinges, and a lock. The sides have loops, to allow the box to be strapped to a saddle. These boxes were all produced in a single workshop, but they fall into distinct two groups. Some, like one recently acquired by the Bodleian Library have flat lids, which often contain a secret compartment. Others, like that at the Rylands, have domed lids and no hidden compartment.

Here is a fully animated 3D model of the Rylands coffret on Sketchfab:

There are over 110 of these gothic coffers surviving, more than half of which contain impressions of woodcuts from the workshop inspired by Jean d’Ypres, so the makers of the boxes were clearly working in the same geographical region as the producers of the prints. In addition to the impression pasted into the coffret, the Rylands also owns a second impression, now loose.

A comparison shows that the impression in the box has been trimmed to fit the space, a feature common across many examples. This does suggest that woodcuts were unlikely to have been made specifically for boxes; one would imagine that some basic measuring would have been done if this was all taking place in one location.

Even with so many coffrets to study, these boxes are still mysterious. Scholars have long debated their use – were they intended to hold relics, books, both? – but recent studies do strongly suggest that they are most likely to have been book boxes. The presence of the secret compartments – perhaps intended for hiding consecrating relics – supports the idea that these boxes acted as portable altars. The combination of box and print fits very neatly with our understanding of changing patterns of devotion in the period, which are characterised by a move away from public devotion towards private, by the increased use and production of personalised devotional books, in small, easily transportable formats, and in the increased importance and use of wood and metal-cut images as focusses of devotion. 

Sandra Hindman has recently uncovered a further important piece of evidence. She has written on the only known contemporary image of one of these boxes, a Northern Renaissance Rest on the Flight, painted in Antwerp c. 1530, which includes a detail of a large, partially opened coffret. This contains a small leather-bound book with clasps, a rosary, a brush, scissors, and two finger-rings, all placed carefully on a white cloth inside the box.

For more on the early printed images and books in the John Rylands Library, see the recently released Early European Print collection on Manchester Digital Collections.

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